


Invictus

by ej3467273



Series: Invictus [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aftermath, Character Death, Established Relationship, F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-21
Updated: 2017-08-18
Packaged: 2018-12-04 21:27:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11563665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ej3467273/pseuds/ej3467273
Summary: After the Infinity Wars and the death of Captain America, the Avengers are fractured once more. Tony Stark struggles to balance rebuilding the Avengers and his family life, while the New Avengers bicker amongst each other. Meanwhile, Peter Parker is facing a new threat in Mr. Negative and the Demons, along with a resurgent Sinister Six.And there's HYDRA trying to redo their plot from Captain America: Winter Soldier because apparently, Nazis don't understand the definition of insanity.





	1. Mr. Negative

_ It matters not how strait the gate.. _

Peter Parker knows he’s not an Avenger. It’s not that he’s not cut out to be one; he’s twenty-three, a recent graduate from Empire State University with a bachelor’s degree in Physics, and recently landed a job as a research assistant to Dr. Curt Connors at Oscorp. Plus he’s Spider-Man. The superhero who defeated the Vulture when he was just fifteen, put the Sinister Six in jail more times than he can count, and probably the only guy who’s ever stopped the Winter Soldier’s metal arm besides Iron Man.

He’s living his own life. He doesn’t need to be involved in the Avengers inner conflicts. He is the master of his own fate, the captain of his own soul. He only sided with Iron Man because he was a naive fifteen year old back in the day, when all he wanted to do was grow up. Looking back, he wished he hadn’t been in such a rush.

_ Such is the nature of life,  _ he muses as he shoots a web at a skyscraper, propelling himself towards it. He’s on patrol once again, penetrating deeper into Wilson Fisk’s territory. Fisk Tower stood as a half completed monument into the now jailed crime lord’s wealth and infamy.

He landed right across from Fisk Tower, observing from a support beam. Construction workers, most of them in Fisk’s actual gang, were milling around, not sure what to do after their leader had been thrown in prison for tax evasion. One of them was moving various construction equipment around and at least half a dozen had rifles and shotguns.

He silently congratulated MJ for her investigative reporting in  _ The Wall Street Journal,  _ a six month endeavor that ended up putting the infamous ‘Kingpin’ behind bars. Not for extortion, assault, and homicide -all of which Fisk had committed- but for not paying taxes. Peter muses that somewhere there’s a libertarian crying havoc. But the major libertarian websites - _ Reason, The Libertarian Republic,  _ and others- have wisely been silent on the Fisk matter. They’ll stick to the little guys who get screwed over by taxes and big government.

His thoughts were interrupted when the workers turned. All of them, the unarmed, the armed, and the people who legitimately had nothing to do with the Kingpin’s gang, wore surprise on their faces. He wondered who the hell just decided to walk right into the most powerful crime boss’s favorite tower.

And that’s when the shooting happened. He scanned further, his suit’s optics zooming in on the bad guys who just barged in.  _ What the hell… _

The men were dressed in either black or white suits and their ethnicity were various, but what truly set them apart from any common criminal gang were the masks they were. They all wore unique masks in the style of ancient Chinese and Japanese art. He recognized one of the designs as the Blue Spirit mask from  _ Avatar: The Last Airbender. These guys are murderers, but at least they have good taste in cartoons. _

His police scanner built into his suit -courtesy of Stark Industries- sparked to life. The New York Police Department didn’t appreciate him listening in on their radio calls, but until they could encrypt their radio transmissions that would be able to beat Ned’s radio interceptors, he could listen all day.

“ _ All units, all units, shots fired at Fisk Tower.” _

He cycled through the gangs that would be mad enough to fight Fisk, even though the big guy was in jail. He canceled out the Maggia and other big gangs -they had too much respect for Fisk- but then his mind clicked.  _ The Demons.  _ They were a new gang that had been formed by what the  _ Daily Bugle  _ dubbed ‘Mr/ Negative’ and had been responsible for a wave of crime hitting the city in the past few months such as increased drug trafficking, armed robbery, and extortion.

_ What are they doing here or who is this Mr. Negative? _

“Ned, you listening?” he said into his communications device and he heard a scramble on the other side, a broken bowl, and a muttering of  _ ‘ah shit’  _ on the other side. He laughed silently. His ‘guy in the chair’ was literally sitting in a chair in Stark Tower, doubling as his aide and IT guy for Stark Industries. “I’m at Fisk Tower. The Demons are moving in on Fisk’s territory.”

“Got it, got it,” Ned said breathlessly. “Thanks for the warning by the way. Don’t talk to me for nearly three hours and interrupt my Skype session with Betty.  _ Typical.” _

Peter ignores the jab because he knows Ned is joking. He was probably playing Galaga. Or the new  _ Star Wars: Battlefront III  _ game.

“I need to tap into their communications. Can you do that?” he asked and Ned  _ harrumphs  _ as if his hacking skills can be questioned.

“Already done. They’re using cell phones to communicate between each other,” Ned informed him and Peter sends him a thank you. He aims his webs at a catwalk right near the middle of the top section of the tower. A second later he is there where he sees three Demons dragging a worker towards a pile of bodies. He grimaces; even after eight years of being Spider-Man, he still can’t stand the sight of death.  _ The murder rate is skyrocketing in New York, yay. _

“Is that all of them on this level?” one of them asked casually as if murdering people, even other bad guys, is just another chore. “Swore I saw one run away…”

“Yeah, but the others are dealing with that guy. Still, we should make sure. Boss wants them dead,” the other answered.

“Peter, you got this?” Ned asks and Peter breathes in. No matter what, he trusts in his abilities. He trusts in the technicians who helped him design and create this suit. Above all else, he trusts in Ned.  _ In Ned We Trust  _ should be printed on the bottom of the dollar instead.

“I got this.”

He webs over to a new vantage point where he sees a Demon patrolling a secluded area near a section that connects two other sections of Fisk Tower. Aiming his web-shooters straight at the Demon, he fires two quick rapid shots which connect to the Demon and he rockets himself straight towards the criminal. Before the Demon can say, ‘huh?’ Peter makes impact with the Demon, breaking a couple of ribs and shattering his rifle in half. Peter quickly wraps him up with his web-shooters and then swings towards a beam right above another Demon.

It’s like clockwork. He’s never faced the Demons before, but they’re like any other criminal gang in New York. Lot of muscle, not a lot of brains, but they do carry guns. He crouches silently above the Demon as the man walks back to where his friend had gone silent. Not a second goes by when the Demon is suddenly yanked upwards and wrapped in webbing that is stronger than steel cables. It doesn’t go unnoticed, however.

The last Demon spots that his partners in crime are no longer visible. Peter can sense his apprehension, his slight fear. He switches his web-shooter combo and aims a web grenade right near a cargo container and when the Demon steps right by it, he’s snatched up by the web hidden within the grenade and trapped.

_ All in a day’s work. _

Peter pushes on, determined to find out what the hell the Demons were doing here. He swings to a new beam and spotting two Demons standing right in front of a mobile crane, he can’t himself. His webs connect with the crane and he pulls back, sending the thousand pound machine towards the Demons. The crane wacks the Demons straight on, knocking them out and most likely breaking a few bones.

_ “Should have worn a helmet,”  _ Peter quips and he hears Ned suppress a fit of giggles on the other side of the communications device. He knows that Ned is watching through his recorder. Karen doesn’t exist anymore, at least in the suit. She’s now his AI assistant at home.  _ She doesn’t really like it, but I don’t need a suit AI to help me anymore. Just Ned, I guess. _

He had cried for an hour when he had made the decision not to incorporate AI in his new suit. Blue and Sentimental he felt, but he was the master of his own fate. He had to make his own destiny. He had been too obsessed with impressing Mr. Stark all those years ago.  _ I am my own man. _

As he is busy observing the scene, trying to figure where the rest of the Demons are, he hears a bark of gunfire, flashes echoing in the steel. Moving forward, he jumps through an open hole in the almost completed wall separating him from the rest of the Demons. He sees five of them, all of them armed. Two construction workers were dead and the last one was on his knees, pleading for his life.

“Please, you got what you came for,” the man cried aloud. “You don’t have to kill us too. For God’s sake, those guys  _ weren’t in the gang!” _

The lead Demon answered it by whipping his rifle around, cracking the man in the jaw. He then aimed his rifle square at the man’s face.

“Fisk’s territory is ours now.”

That answered Peter’s question of why the Demons were here, but it still didn’t answer the question of who Mr. Negative was.

_ Great, gotta save a bad guy. _

He prepared himself, his web-shooters locking in onto the ‘construction worker’ and he propelled himself forward like a bullet right over a steel beam. He was fast and his web-shooter shot a web straight at Fisk’s man. It wrapped around the guy and he was sent up, hanging upside down from the steel beam. Peter then used that momentum to swing himself around and give a bruising kick straight into the Demon who was about to shoot the guy.

“It’s Spider-Man!” the remaining thugs cried out. “Tell the boss he’s here!”

_ Let me introduce myself then.  _ Two of the men had dropped their guns for some reason, opting to go for the ‘let’s attack him one at time’ route like so many bad guys before them. He chuckles as he launches into a spinning kick that knocks one of the dumbasses out in one go and then twists his body to bring his other foot down crashing on the other idiot. Two guys knocked out in less than three seconds.  _ A new record. _

The other two wisely keep their distance and fire their guns at him. Spider-sense is something that modern weaponry cannot defeat, as he is alerted to each bullet’s path before they erupt from the barrel. He bobs and weaves through each bullet sent towards him. He then flips over a fallen thug and shoots out a web, barely avoiding a burst of gunfire.

The web attaches itself to the Demon and he twists his body again to bring the bad guy forward. He then somersaults over the Demon, bringing the web around like a noose that wraps around his arms and forces them near his face. Peter pulls hard, sending the Demon down as his own fists do the damage.  _ Why are you hitting yourself?  _ Peter laughs at his own joke.

The last Demon recognizes he’s alone. Spider-Man is everything that the legend tells of and Peter can tell he’s scared. Really scared and for a moment, Peter feels empathy and sorrow for the man. He doesn’t know what lead this man to go on the road he’s gone, but it was too late to change course. The Demon clutches his gun even tighter, most likely willing himself to face the demon in front of him.

_ I took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference,  _ Peter recites to himself. He blames MJ. Her love of poetry was beginning to affect him.  _ Hell’s it always affected me. _

“Ah fuck it, I surrender,” the Demon says suddenly and Peter is surprised. His spider-eyes widen as the Demon drops his gun and takes off his mask. “Yeah, yeah, web me up and leave me for the cops. At least I won’t have a broken sternum like the dumbasses over there.”

Peter obliges, tying up the man’s hands and feet, and collects the weapons. He leaves them for the police as a nicely wrapped present dangling from the steel beam. He then lowers himself upside down to Fisk’s loyal man. The man is groaning in pain and Peter sympathizes. Not everyday you get cracked by an AR-15 across the jaw.

A ringing sound graces Peter’s ears and he sees a phone start to slide out of the man’s pocket. How it didn’t slide before is an intriguing question, but what’s more intriguing is finding out who’s calling. He slings a web and catches the phone before it hits the ground and hits the green phone button to answer it.

It’s a FaceTime kind of call and he sees a  _ giant  _ man in an orange jumpsuit on the screen. His head is shaved completely and there is no trace of hair anywhere on the face or even above the eyes. But the angry scowl, the brisk and fluid movements tells Peter exactly who this.

“ _ Willy!”  _ Peter greets enthusiastically. The man known as the Kingpin swivels his head like a desk chair. Pure hatred radiates from his sunken eyes. Still, the jumpsuit does make him appear skinnier than usual. “Nice jumpsuit. Slimming.”

“You. Stay out of my business.”

“Kind of can’t considering that there are Demons crawling all over your tower. Can’t you hire better security?”

“Goodbye.”

_ Wait, he probably knows about who the Demon’s leader is. _

“ _ Wait!”  _ he repeats his thought. “Who’s the leader of the Demons?”

The man chuckles, even though he’s locked up in a maximum security prison a dozen miles off the coast. Peter would have liked to see him locked up in the Raft, the government’s own little private holding area for ‘enhanced’ individuals, but apparently being the biggest crime boss on this side of the Mississippi doesn’t qualify for that little exclusive club.

“Keep my men alive and maybe I’ll tell you.”

The calls end and Peter is kind of pissed off.

No, he doesn’t want to keep bad guys alive from other bad guys despite his hatred for death. Somewhere in the back of his mind, the memory of Uncle Ben getting shot echoes throughout his brain.  _ They deserve nothing more.  _ But then MJ tugs him back in the other direction.  _ Doesn’t matter what a bad guy’s done, doesn’t mean they need to end up six feet under. _

_ Jesus Christ, I love you so much MJ.  _ She doesn’t really like the ‘L’ word, but he repeats enough that she’s okay with it. Sometimes she says it back, usually followed by ‘nerd’, ‘doofus’, or ‘dweeb.’ He loves her even more after those insults.

He soon finds himself on a winch observing the rest of the tower. He’s near where the rest of the Demons are, most likely mopping the rest of Fisk’s men.  _ Mopping away their blood, intestines, and inner organs.  _ That’s when a helicopter starts to circle around the building; he spots a big guy in white collared shirt and black vest and another man...who looks oddly familiar.

“Saving bad guys from other bad guys. Not what I was expecting to be doing today,” he mutters to himself. Ned is silent on the other end; he usually is, unless he needs to tell Peter something urgent. Nothing is urgent.  _ Yet. _

He hears echoes of gunfire through the tower. He closes his eyes. He can’t save them all. He’s only one man, one man trying to hold the tide that is organized crime. That’s what any of them were really. Even Mr. Stark was just a man. Captain America. The Hulk. All of these powerful individuals who were larger than life.  _ I’m just a man. _

_ I do the best that I can and I hope you understand. After all, I'm just a man.  _ He sometimes curses MJ’s really weird music taste. One minute she’s jamming to Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Humble’, the next minute she’s pretending to play the guitar and singing along to Jason Aldean, one of the whitest country music singers America has produced in the last three decades. Still...it does give him some comfort.

His suit picks up the signatures of five Demons on the second tallest section of Fisk Tower. It’s the one that connects two different areas together; one of the areas is built significantly taller than the others. He swings that way and lands cat-like on another steel beam.  _ Another reason why I love New York.  _ Can you imagine a Spider-Man in the suburbs? Memories of crashing through treehouses, pools, and scaring little girls camping in their backyard come to mind.

_ Yes. It’s not very pretty. _

The Demon is kicking one of Fisk’s men, repeatedly. The other men are being hauled off to God knows where, probably to be executed gang-style. The Demons are undoubtedly  _ brutal.  _ A lot of men have died today. Some of them innocent. Others not so much. Still, did they deserve to die like this? Thrown in a pile of bodies and left to rot?

“ _ Please don’t-”  _ and the man is silent as the Demon delivers another brutal kick. The lounging Demons laugh at his misery and Peter can’t take it.

He dispatches them all within ten seconds. A web over the mouth, a wisecrack or two, and a steel beam rotating like a ceiling fan, hitting three men. He almost hurled one of the Demons off the tower but he whipped him right back into the concrete ground, though not gently. Fisk’s man is groaning on the ground, but he’s safe. Scanning the rest of the area, he sees that the remaining Demons fled, leaving Fisk’s men alone. He quickly webs them up though.  _ Can’t have you escaping. _

“Ned, get me a line to Wilson Fisk,” he says through his communications device. Ned complies, not offering anything but silence. He gets serious as well on this job. Though Ned doesn’t see it first-hand, he sees death all the time as well. Brutal shit that should be in a horror movie, not real life. Peter often wonders how Ned deals with it.

“Fisk, your men are safe. Your turn. Who is the leader of the Demons?” and he gets another deep chuckle in response.

“You’re about to find out.”

The line goes dead. Peter suppresses a desire to swing over to Death Island himself and beat it out of Fisk. He’s angry, he knows that.  _ Breathe Pete, breath. Who the fuck is Mr. Negative? _

A helicopter is his answer. He looks up, to see an angry man with Asian features looking down at him. The lower-half of his face is glowing black and white, like a photo negative.  _ So that’s why they call you Mr. Negative.  _ His suit is black and white as well, going along with the bad guy theme he’s seen all-day. He looks to be in his late thirties to mid-forties. His hair, which isn’t covered in glowie energy, is salt and pepper.

And that’s when it clicks. He knows who this man is. He’s never met him before, but he’s seen his face plastered on newspapers, billboards, and the homeless shelter his Aunt May volunteers at on the weekends.

_ No fucking way.  _ The man is Martin Li, one of New York’s most influential and powerful philanthropists. A man who takes time out of his day to feed the homeless, finance poor inner city schools, and be a general good guy. Not a lot of rich guys care for the little guy.  _ Adrian Toomes probably doesn’t hate this guy. _

He’s also running for Mayor.

As the helicopter flies away, heading north, Peter’s mind can only go to worrying about Aunt May. And that he needs to contact Mr. Stark. No, he’s not an Avenger. But he may need a little backup on this one.


	2. Happy Wife, Happy Life

_ Greater love has no more than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. _

Tony Stark used to be a devoted atheist. What God sat by as wars raged, famines came and went, and allowed a man’s parents to be ruthlessly killed on the side of a deserted road? God was nothing but a figure in the sky that men long ago created to give them comfort. As the ideas of religion grew, that comfort turned into control. Control invites challenge which turned into conflict. And conflict, as Vision like to eloquently say to this very day, breeds catastrophe. 

_ New York. Washington D.C. Sokovia. Wakanda. Earth.  _ But something changed in him that day. Steve Rogers, the arrogant, self-righteous prick who he had to measure up to as a kid despite  _ never  _ meeting the man until he was in his forties, who slowly became his friend. Who slowly became the brother he had always wanted. Steve Rogers, the man who was the very definition of America. Truth. Justice. The American way.

He will always remember Steve’s sacrifice. Spider-Man lying on the ground, bleeding from half a dozen wounds, half of the Guardians of the Galaxy scattered to the four winds by Thanos’s Black Order. The rest of the Avengers struggling to keep Thanos at bay. When Captain America, the very definition of a hero, rushed Thanos.

Vibranium shield against the Infinity Gauntlet. Cap’s shield had absorbed Thor’s hammer like it was nothing -he will always remember how powerful the absorption of the blow had been- but the Infinity Gauntlet, powered by the five Infinity Stones, was much different. Cap’s shield had cracked in half. The vision where he was lying dead, the shield that had once been the symbol of America itself, shattered next to him.  _ No. You move.  _

He had laid down his life for the Avengers. Thanos had barely recovered from his shock when Stark, Vision, and Thor had combined their powers together and sent Thanos hurling down to the Earth before Bruce Banner transformed into the Hulk and smashed the self-proclaimed God in the ground. Nothing was left of the mad figure being except for the Gauntlet, which was charred and broken in half. Stark had given the damned thing to ‘Star-Lord’ and Gamora, the only two survivors of the Guardians. They had suffered the most after all. 

When they buried Captain America, shield and all, he believed in a higher power. What kind of higher power, he would never know, but he  _ believed.  _ Tragedy has a weird way of restoring faith in a person. It cleans the bias from the person’s soul and makes them look at it from a different outlook. 

And with Cap gone, the remaining Avengers that had sided with him either were merged back into the fold or disappeared. Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes were somewhere out there, fighting the wars that Captain America did while Wanda and Vision had retired to the countryside. Scott Lang had been buried in his native California, next to Hank Pym. His children, a daughter and a son, would grow up without a father.

_Family._ He had one now, a biological one at least. Mari Stark was only three years of age, but she was a bundle of joy. He never realized how immature he had been just sixteen years ago when he had first become Iron Man. Back then, he was a cocky son of a bitch. _I wanted to privatize world peace and ended up building a murdering AI that almost destroyed the Earth and almost_ _tore apart the Avengers._ How the years passed. Pepper and him weren’t getting any younger, but Mari made him feel invigorated. 

_ This is the future.  _ He gazed at the hologram of the old Avengers. Some of them retired, others still active. Out of all of them though, Rogers was the only one who had died.  _ Should have been me,  _ he had thought in those dark moments after the Infinity Wars. Sometimes he still believed it, when the nightmares came and the faces of the dead came crawling deep into the crevices of his soul.

He compared it to the New Avengers.  _ Ironheart. Ms. Marvel. Hawkeye. Nova.  _ They were the beginnings of a new team. Riri Williams had built an armored suit of her dorm room at M.I.T. It reminded Tony of how he had scraped together his first Iron Man suit.  _ I built this damn thing in a cave. With a box of scraps!   _ But he had grown up around tech, his father the foremost American inventor the 20th century had seen, and the heir to a fortune. She was a fifteen-year-old kid, without any guidance but a YouTube video. 

Which was why he took her under his wing. He wanted her to avoid the same mistakes he had made. She reminded him of Peter Parker in a way, how she eagerly absorbed everything he told her. Taught her.  _ I want you to be better than I ever was.  _

“Mr. Stark, Ms. Potts is asking that you come upstairs for dinner,” F.R.I.D.A.Y said, breaking his thoughts. “She also says that she will legally become Ms. Pepper Potts once more if you keep looking for ways to upgrade Ironheart’s suit without her knowing.”

Tony chuckled. Pepper Potts, the greatest love of his life (besides his daughter of course) and the woman who had stood by his side for almost thirty years. She’s still a magnificent beauty, even in her late forties. He counts his lucky stars that he’s married to her, even though she went by Ms. Potts professionally. 

“Tell her I’ll be right up,” he says and he gets out of his chair in the basement. They were currently staying in one of their more discreet homes; a small farm in the middle of Kansas. He liked the countryside. A much different environment from the city -hell it’s different from the Avengers home base in upstate New York- and it calms him.  _ Heh.  _ Usually, it’s tech or Pepper who calms him.

He throws the design specs for upgrades to Ironheart’s suit from his computer to his glasses. Pepper didn’t need to know that he had the ability to look at anything in his glasses. She probably did, but a man can dream, can’t he? He sighed as he got up from his comfy desk chair and asked F.R.I.D.A.Y to dim the lights as he walked up the stairs.

Pepper didn’t make dinner. She hadn’t made dinner since he had met her all those years ago. So imagine his surprise when he glided into the kitchen with a stylish flair and she was doing the finishing touches to dinner, apron on. Happy was in the living room, snoring away with Mari drawing something on his face. 

“You’re making dinner?” he asked, flabbergasted. “What did I do wrong? Did I forget our wedding anniversary? Is Mari stuck in a well? Wait, don’t tell me...okay actually tell me.”

Pepper smiled, her eyes lighting up like a Christmas tree. His heart sang and he wanted a string quartet of violins to be in the background. No matter how many times he sees her a day, he falls in love all over again.

“Nothing is wrong, I just wanted to make dinner,” she informed him and he stood there with his mouth still open. “You can shut your mouth now.”

He promptly shut it his mouth, teeth clashing against each other, and he looked at her with wide eyes.  _ Why was she making dinner? Is this part of the whole modern woman thing? I don’t know. Shit, I knew I should have read those books Peter’s girlfriend is always going on about.  _

“How’s the Ironheart armor going?” she asked him as she started to drip red sauce over the pasta. “Don’t lie to me Tony, I know you were working on it and that you have stored in your glasses.”

He didn’t bother to hide his grin. “It’s going well. I’m trying to increase the shield refracting rate, but I can’t do that without overloading the reactor or increasing its power by a couple hundred percent. Maybe Riri can come up with something about that.”

“She’s a smart kid.”

_ The smartest.  _ She’s smarter than him. She is everything he should have been as a teenager; smart, dependable, a leader. Everything he should have been  _ before  _ he became Iron Man. Responsible. 

“Mari! Stop drawing hearts on Happy’s face and come here for dinner!” Pepper called out. Tony could see Happy start to stir, the gray hairs on his head starting to become more and more apparent every single day. Tony had some as well, fine silver pieces fitting with the black hairs on his chin as well. Mari giggled as she drew one more heart on Happy’s face before making her great escape. 

Happy’s eyes opened one by one, Tony’s bodyguard of several decades not very happy to be awake. Mari’s blue eyes twinkled with mischief as she climbed onto her chair and awaited dinner patiently. Her very face was the picture of innocence despite what she had just done.  _ The heir to an empire.  _

He clasped his hands on the chair and dragged backward, watching as Mari stifled a giggle when Happy stumbled into the kitchen, towards the table. He kept his mouth shut as Happy slid a chair back and sat it in before activating his phone and looking at the camera. 

“What the... _ MARI!”  _ he practically shouted, though a withering glare from Pepper and Tony shut him down. He started to mumble to himself, as he was prone to do, though a small smile was on his face. 

Dinner was  _ not  _ a quiet affair. Mari rattled off her dreams, Happy kept grumbling about getting a much-needed vacation, and Pepper and Tony sparred back and forth about what to do with Stark Industries and how to keep moving forward. He also discreetly checks the Ironheart armor in his glasses, though Pepper catches him often. 

He offers her his most winning smile when she berates him about it the fifth time with Mari asking about Spider-Man once more. That’s when his glasses light up once more. It was a message from Peter.  _ What in God’s name does he want? He’s independent.  _

He read it. He understood it. He looked at Pepper with sad eyes. She nods her understanding. 

“Go."

It’s a word she says often and a word that Tony hates. But he’s Iron Man. He might be getting on older in years, but he still had a responsibility to this world. To the Avengers.  _ To Steve.  _ He pushed his chair back, gave Mari a kiss on the forehead, and made his way to the basement. 

A minute later, Iron Man was seen rocketing across the sky of Kansas, heading east towards New York.  

**Author's Note:**

> This is going to be an ambitious undertaking. This version of Spider-Man is modeled after the one in the new Spider-Man video game coming on mixed in with Tom Holland's version. MJ is Zendaya's Michelle Jones, if that wasn't clear. Riri Williams (Iron Man's protege) Kamala Khan (new Ms. Marvel) and other characters are new additions to the Marvel comic universe. 
> 
> Also, the title is named after William Ernest Henley's poem Invictus. I'd recommend reading it, it's a great poem.


End file.
